Daily Archives: March 15, 2007

My final post in Jesusism-Paulism — “Embrace and Extend“” — is getting good press throughout the blogosphere. Castle Argghhh, Dreaming 5GW, and Spooky Action have already commented on my comparison between Microsoft and early Christianity. Now I will give a specific example of how “love” can be given too strongly and too early – in other words, inappropriately — if one’s OODA loops is too slow.

I have seen something else under the sun:The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.

The message of Christianity, and the means of Microsoft, is this: your enemy expects resistence. A fool fights fair.

Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant, cutting off his right ear. (The servant’s name was Malchus.)

The focus, however, is never on defending, but on regaining and using the initiative so that you can lead your opponents where you want them to be.

Now, back to Microsoft:

Some years ago it became clear that there was energy in favor of moving to standard, XML methods for storing data. While XML-style standards are hardly a new idea (going back to the 1950s), the correlation of forces had finally swung in a strcutured, standard direction. Microsoftobligingly loved XML standards, creating OfficeOpenXML as the new standard file format for Microsoft Office.

OfficeOpenXML is a perfect example of the embrace & extend philosophy, which takes up the form of an enemy in order to destroy the enemy’s intent. It apperas similar to OpenDocument, originally just the native file format of OpenOffice, and has features such as:

A 6,000 page specification document

Internal contradictions, such as standard functions that behave differently in different applications

Purposefully incorrect statements, such as describing 1900 as a leap year Internally and externally incoherent methods of describing numbers and percentages

In the same way that Christians adopted Easter and December 25th as festivals, while stripping them of their original meaning and forcing those dates to serve the Church, Microsoft adapts a structured XML standard to defeat the purpose of standards. Nonetheless, Microsoft’s political muscle got OfficeOpenXML fast-tracked for approval. So far, a perfect victory.

However, since OfficeOpenXML was originally proposed OpenDocument has become an OASIS, ISO, and IEC Standard, and supported by Google’s online word processor. Microsoft now faces a market with three major file formats:

DOC/XLS/PPT — the old standards for Microsoft Office which are widely used

This bad situation could have been avoided if Microsoft had been more agile — if it had been able to cycle through the OODA loop faster or had been able to embrace OpenDocument once it emerged. In the frist case, it would have been able to pre-empt OpenDocument by getting OfficeOpenXML rapidly confirmed as a standard. In the second case, it could have merely “embraced and extended” OpenDocument by creating its own version.

Nowadays, the only valid options for Microsoft appear to be a conventional attack (trying as hard as possible to defeat OpenDocument with OfficeOpenXML) or a loving attack on OpenDocument specifically (abandoning OfficeOpenXML, and merely creating a slightly incompatible version of OpenDocument). Microsoft is resilient, so my money is on abandoning their failed effort and trying to love OpenDocument to death. Microsoft tried this before. In the early days of the browser wars, Microsoft Internet Explorer identified itself to web sites as “Internet Explorer” through the standard user agent string mechanism. When it became clear this would not work, because Netscape was conventionally more poewrful, Microsoft Internet Explorer attacked Netscape unconventionally by identifying IE as a Netscape browser.

To defeat Netscape, Microsoft embraced and extended Netscape. To defeat OpenDocument, Microsoft will abandon her efforts to defeat OpenDocument and instead embrace and extend.

Microsoft will not cut off the ear of her enemy’s slave, but she will drink from the cup given to her.